Dr. Wyatt is an associate professor in Urologic Sciences at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He is a senior research scientist at the Vancouver Prostate Centre and a senior scientist at BC Cancer. Dr. Wyatt has a DPhil in genetics from the University of Oxford. His research goals are to identify associations between genomic alterations and patient outcomes in metastatic prostate and bladder cancer, and to translate these findings into clinical biomarkers.
Dr. Wyatt has developed novel laboratory and computational techniques to study plasma circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA). Through application of these methods to clinical trial cohorts, his team has demonstrated that ctDNA is highly representative of metastatic lesions, and that somatic alterations detected in ctDNA can help predict prostate cancer therapy resistance or response.
Dr. Wyatt is the chair of correlative sciences and tumour biobanking for the Canadian Cancer Trial Group (CCTG) and through this role is involved in design and execution of phase I-III clinical trial protocols across Canada. Dr. Wyatt directs the ctDNA screening strategy and the molecular tumor board for the first multi-center phase 2 umbrella trial in metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (NCT03385655, NCT02905318).
At BC Cancer (the institution responsible for cancer care across the province of British Columbia), Dr. Wyatt is the Scientific Director of the Clinical Cancer Genomics Laboratory. In this role, Dr. Wyatt provides leadership in instituting province-wide cancer genetics and genomics testing programs for patients with cancer in B.C.
Dr. Wyatt’s laboratory team is physically housed at the Vancouver Prostate Centre located on the VCH campus. The Vancouver Prostate Centre is part of the Department of Urologic Sciences (FoM, UBC), and part of VCHRI. Dr. Wyatt’s current laboratory team consists of 7 graduate students, 4 technicians, and 2 postdoctoral fellows, as well as several undergraduate appointments.
Non-scientific summary
Dr. Wyatt’s research looks at DNA that is circulating in the bloodstream. In people with cancer, a proportion of this ‘free’ DNA in the blood will be coming from their cancer. It means that by profiling the DNA in blood samples from patients, you can obtain very useful information about their disease: similar to the information obtained from a tissue biopsy. Dr. Wyatt’s research team has pioneered this so-called ‘liquid biopsy’ in prostate cancer and their work has led to hundreds of scientific papers, new clinical trials, and new diagnostic tests in the advanced disease setting.